Along for the wild ride with a freewheeling artist

CHUCK Palahniuk’s fifth novel, “Diary,” is at once madly inventive and shamelessly derivative, instructive and infuriating, serious and cartoonish, tender and sadistic. It simply, exuberantly, escapes literary categorization. Think Stephen King meets Robert Coover meets Jonathan Swift; that’s how a desperate Hollywood pitchman might try to convey the book’s mix of flavors to a mogul producer -- a description unlikely to result in a deal.

Palahniuk’s legion of die-hard fans needs no pitch for this new tale by the author of “Fight Club,” which became a 1999 movie. This book could be as well, because this purported diary of “Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history” is all about the visual: the twinned natures of insight and illusion; and, intrinsic to the convoluted plot, the nitty-gritty of painting.

Misty Marie Wilmot, nee Kleinman, was minimally raised by a hippie single mom who worked two grunt jobs while spouting anti-capitalist jeremiads: “ ‘Scratch any fortune ... and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back.’ Saying this was supposed to make their trailer lifestyle better.” For Misty, who refers to herself in the third person, the only thing that sweetened blue-collar life was painting -- coloring in her imaginary escape world, that is. “Her fantasy village ... the sugary dreams of the poor lonely kid she’d be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.” Yes, our diarist, who flees from rags to riches by marrying a rich albeit shiftless fellow art school student, does have issues with self-esteem. But this doesn’t hinder her expression of disgust and derision for most everyone she meets. Her husband-to-be: “The only difference between Peter and a homeless mental outpatient with limited access to soap was his jewelry.” The denizens of idyllic Waytansea Island: “Whenever one of the local sea turtles comes in clutching her pearls at her withered throat ... then you need to take two drinks.” The summer tourists who invade and pollute: “their long hooked fingernails the color of Jordan almonds.” Her mother-in-law: “Her chin is tucked down so hard her neck is squashed into folds from ear to ear.”

And when Peter is reduced by bungled suicide to a hospital-warehoused vegetable on the mainland, she writes in her diary: “With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons clench in tighter and tighter.” The only one to escape the jaundice tinge of her eye is her 13-year-old daughter, Tabitha. “Her dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, she’s the perfect Waytansea Island child. All pink lipstick and nail polish. Playing some lovely and old-fashioned game.”

But just what sort of game is underway here? Why, as the mossy fortunes dwindle and the blueblood islanders slave for summer people in the Waytansea Hotel, does the church congregation whisper prayers that Misty, who long ago hung up her sable brushes, return to her vocation? What is the meaning of the messages she finds penciled in library books or scratched into window sills, cryptic warnings from two female painters of earlier generations: “Leave this island before you can’t”? For all the grotesquerie of Misty’s thickening predicament, in which her physical and mental sufferings accelerate and accumulate, there is something lighthearted in the execution. Characterization is sketchy. (What is it about trailer parks that are supposed to automatically produce American heroes?) The complex plot skates on the edge of our disbelief, touching down into plausible cause and effect before soaring into the supernatural. Beneath the gore and pyrotechnics and satire on old blood versus new money, Palahniuk is trying to sift out the connection between misery and inspiration, suffering and access to the collective subconscious, and in the process an amazing range of grist gets swept into his mill: Carl Jung, Jainism, the Essenes, the lethal potential of pigments, masochism and a startling phenomenon called the Stendhal Effect -- all interesting in themselves and all contributing clues to Misty’s fate. Can he possibly deliver himself, and Misty Marie, from the snares of the questions he’s left open? The pages seem to turn themselves faster and faster, right to the very last -- and maybe that’s the answer.